Money
Not poor, just no money: Social and cultural capital
Gerber repeated throughout his autobiography a refrain that he remembered his mother saying often as he grew up, “we’re not poor, we just don’t have any money.” In an effort to detangle that apparent contradiction, we must turn to the theories of social and cultural capital put forth by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Economically, the family was not well off, though they never lacked for basic necessities. Gerber laid blame on his father that the family struggled economically. He talked about his mother struggling, not having any money, and said, “She had no money because, as I will tell you later, my father, Julius Gerber, the head of the Socialist Party of the United States, but more of the world than of worldly goods.”13
Lena Gerber, Ludwig's mother
By way of illustrating the financial situation of the family, Gerber described how his mother bought the house that he grew up in and its condition. According to Gerber, his mother ‘purloined’ his father’s gold watch and pawned it for $40, hoping that combined with her $10 savings it would be enough to purchase a newly built house. The builder accepted her money as a down payment, and she made regular payments for a long time, and “She made them religiously. I don’t know how she got the money, but she managed. She forwent everything.” At the time she finally paid off the mortgage, Gerber remembered that it was still in the same unimproved state that she bought it in all those years ago, “During all that time, she had never improved it because she had no money. There was no paint on the walls. There was just brick outside. Walls, floors, no paint on the walls.”14
The middle-class values that Gerber’s father brought with him from Riga, Latvia, his connections in the socialist party, and the strong commitment to education of Gerber’s mother, combined to give the family a social and cultural capital that was vital in Gerber’s perception of the world around him. The conviction that he was never poor, just did not have money, at various times in his life—generally when one job ended and he had to find another—likely afforded him a confidence that helped him along the way. His class was not determined by his economic status, but rather by his education and family background.
The advantages that were afforded him by these two assets are highlighted by an incident while he was in Washington, DC. He was at a party hosted by a man who had worked in his father’s office, Arthur Lash, and upon being introduced to Eleanor Roosevelt was told by her, “I know your father. I’ve always admired him. Come and sit here and talk to me.”15 While his father may not have provided wealth to Gerber, he certainly provided capital of another kind.
While on the one hand Gerber grew up in a home with no paint on the walls, he also “lived like a millionaire’s child”16 when he went to visit his sister after she moved to an estate in Westchester County. He remembered visiting her when she and her husband were still struggling to get a start in life, and lived in an attic apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Once her husband had established himself as a lawyer, he purchased an estate, Wayside, in Mount Kisco, NY; it was an impressive, 139 acre estate with a 37 room house, stables, and greenhouse. Gerber would stay the weekend when he visited, and said that the beautiful estate “gave me ideas, which I still have—of glory—of the value of wealth and beauty.”17
Watching the rise of his sister and brother-in-law as a child, it must have seemed to him that with education and hard work, anything was possible. Seeing the stark contrast Gerber experienced between a house without paint on its walls and a beautiful estate, we can better understand the resentment he felt toward his father for not providing the family with more economically. His visits to his sister gave him an ideal, a concept of what the good life could encompass, expanding his horizons far beyond expectations that he might otherwise have had. It seems fortunate for Gerber that as a young man he had a mentor who modeled an integration of socialist ideals, which Gerber blamed at least in part for the family’s economic conditions, with personal wealth.